There was a pause.
Balidor could almost see the other seer blinking, trying to comprehend what he was asking through the haze of sleep.
“Yes,” Vikram said then, his voice suddenly decisive. “Do you remember where I am?”
“Yes.”
“The door will be open, brother,” Vikram said. “Stay as long as you want.”
Balidor exhaled in relief. “Thank you, brother.”
“Torek would give you your own room, you know,” Vikram added. “Even this late at night. I believe brother Torek keeps vampire hours, if the Sword is to be believed.” Pausing at Balidor’s silence, he went on hastily, “Not that I don’t welcome the company… I do. It is lonely with my own room.”
Balidor almost chuckled at that.
He knew it was sheer kindness on the other’s part to say such a thing.
Vikram spent his days crammed into the ship’s tech team labs.
Given that those labs were wall-to-wall sweaty seers and humans, not to mention machines, and foul-smelling organic circuits in algae-coated tubs––and given what Balidor knew about Vikram himself, and his fondness for silence, and meditation, and long walks in nature––the idea that he wouldn’t cherish his alone time was absurd.
“You are a kind-hearted soul, Vik,” Balidor said, meaning the words with all his heart, with a near-vehemence after the day and night he’d had. “I promise not to impose on you for long. I confess, I am too tired to deal with the issue formally, at least tonight. I need sleep. I’ll talk to brother Torek in the morning.”
He practically saw Vikram nodding, thinking about this.
“It’s a final thing, then?” the other ventured cautiously.
Balidor had already changed direction in the corridor, aiming his booted feet for the residential area housing the quarters of the East Indian seer.
Thinking about his friend’s question, Balidor found himself remembering the look on Yarli’s face right before he turned away. He remembered how her light felt as he walked to the door, as he prepared to leave for good, exiting the quarters they’d shared since they first boarded the aircraft carrier.
“Very final, I’d say,” he said, exhaling. “Without question.”
“I am sorry, brother,” Vikram said, his voice openly sympathetic.
Warmth pulsed off the seer, tangible in Balidor’s heart.
He acknowledged that warmth with light-warmth of his own.
“Thank you, brother,” he said. “I am sorry, too.”
Frowning faintly, however, even as he said it, Balidor wondered if that was true.
Even now, the predominant feeling in his aleimi was relief.
He felt guilty about that, too, but it didn’t change the feeling.
Five
Mirror, Mirror
She is laughing, kicking through waves.
He sees her this happy so rarely, it is a gift to see it now.
That is in spite of why he is here.
That is in spite of the fact that those less-happy memories are the ones he needs to do his job. It is trauma where his purpose lives. It forces him to pull her away from happy thoughts again and again, so he can mine that trauma with his infiltrator’s light.
It is the only way he knows to help her heal the fissures in her aleimi, the broken parts of her mind and light.
For a few moments, though, he lets her have this.
He lets himself have it.
He watches her, smiling inside his light. He sees that violet and white glow in her heart flare out as she laughs, creating an aura around her small, brown-limbed form. There are shadows in her heart now, things that come and go, but that broken, black structure left by Menlim and the Dreng is years away from her still.
He cannot deny how much he enjoys seeing her throw back her head and laugh.
He cannot deny how much he enjoys feeling her light, feeling her heart, feeling her love for her friends. A near-freedom lives in her mind. She has an ability to detach from the darkness that tries to swallow her; that ability allows her to forget all the bad things, all the things that will return once she is alone––for a short time, at least.
She lets it all go in the salty waves and yellow sun.
She lets it all go, and pretends she is just like her friends.
She pretends they are her real family.
Her and Allie both look so young, and Jon––
Jon is almost unrecognizable.
All three of them are so different, he realizes, as he looks from one of them to the next. Allie’s entire facial structure has changed, seemingly even the placement of the bone that makes up her skull. He remembers this, vaguely, after her marriage to Revik. He remembers how quickly she seemed to go from human to seer, in her cheekbones, her jawline, her height, the way she moved her body, her mouth, her eyes.
As fast as it seemed at the time, it happened gradually then. To see the before so starkly now shocks something in Balidor’s heart.
They are so young.
Cassandra is so young.
He still sees sadness in her light, even as she splashes Jon, dodging him as they run like lanky colts through the waves of Baker Beach. She throws back her head, laughing again, but that sadness lingers.
He cannot help but see the bruise on the side of her face.
Sadly, he can’t even be sure if that one is from Jack, the human drug addict she is dating in this part of her timeline, or if the bruise is from her father, who still hits her whenever she goes home for more than a few days.
Allie is stuffing sand down Cass’s bathing suit, and Cass shrieks, shoving her so that Alyson lands on her back in the water.
Both of them promptly burst into laughter.
Balidor watches them play in the waves.
It is almost like praying.
It is almost a respite.
He knows they will go somewhere else soon, somewhere darker.
He can feel it at the edges of her light already, how this is a brief burst of light, of afternoon sun on her face, right before things take a darker turn.
He can feel her trying to keep him from that darkness.
He can feel her resisting leaving the sun and waves.
He can feel how a part of her wants to stay here, forever.
A part of her wants to remember only this.
A part of him wishes he could give her that.
He wishes he could keep her here, too.
But he has a job to do, and in the end, that matters more.
After a few more minutes, he tries to tug her back, to focus on the black structure that lives on her heart, that controls today’s Cassandra. He focuses on the hints of that black structure that live on her even while she splashes through waves.
He knows that is the root of it.
Those are the scars in her light Menlim used to break her.
Those are the doors the Dreng walked through and locked––using them to twist her mind and light, to turn her into a shadow form of herself.
He focuses on her heart, on how it was back in those years.
He finds that dark spot in her light.
He feels her resist harder––harder than she has in a while.
When he pulls on her with more of his light’s strength, she fights him openly, and he feels a resonance there, a thread that strengthens between them. He feels her despair in that, her helplessness, her wanting to not be alone.
He feels that, and a part of him opens, reaching for her.
He does it without thought.
He does it without contemplating what it might do, how it might derail things between them. He opens his light, and that resonance between them grows. It grows out of his light. It grows out of her light. It grows out of their dark, as well.
It grows out of the gray spaces in between.
He feels Cass recognize that resonance.
It is not the light parts that surprise her so much as the dark parts.
She sees the dark in him and wonders.
She sees the dark in him and doubts her own perception.
He is Adhipan Balidor.
He has no darkness in him. It’s not possible.
The thought should be funny to him.
Instead it moves him. Something about that childlike faith in him, in seeing him as his myth, rather than the flawed, living mess that he actually is––it both moves him and nearly makes him sad. He finds it so incredibly touching, he opens more.
She feels that, too.
Before he can comprehend how she is reacting––
* * *
––he gasps, even as something changes.
There is a shift.
Balidor feels it. He feels the change.
The tug is strong, like someone wrenching a steering wheel from his hands.
He forgets sometimes, just how strong she is.
He forgets not just what she is but who.
She is an intermediary. She is not just some broken girl, or even some broken seer. She is one of the Four. Her light is meant to rival that of the Sword.
Her light is meant to rival that of the Bridge herself.
He watches her wrench that steering wheel out of his light’s hands.
No part of the change originates from him, but he feels every step of it as it occurs. He watches it happen with a kind of stunned fascination. He feels her, so much of her, winding through his light, looking for something.
She is looking.
She is looking so intently––
He feels the resonance there, the familiarity.
It should probably make him nervous. It should probably scare him, her sudden interest in his light, in parts of him she might be angling to exploit.
He lets her, though.
He lets her, and he feels oddly calm, even knowing he probably can’t stop her.
Then, she finds what she is looking for.
The timeline tilts.
Everything… everything inside Balidor’s mind… everything tilts. The suddenness of the break creates a kind of vertigo, disorienting him beyond where he can pull it back.
He is falling.
He is falling…
Into her. Around her.
The swiftness of the fall catches him off-guard, pulling him so quickly off-track it takes him a long stretch of silence to remember who he is, what he is doing. He usually feels something before she jerks him to a new part of her past, a different part of her mind.
This time, he sees no reason in it, no ending prior to the change.
He feels nothing from her now, no hint of what she wants.
He cannot even feel an emotion from her.
Then, without warning, he is there.
He is exactly where she wants him.
* * *
He is inside a different room, a different structure.
That energy of past and present once more collides.
It is intense this time––much more intense than before, much more intense than in any of their sessions prior to this one.
The differences are so great his light cannot adjust at first.
He feels drugged, like his entire center of gravity has been moved. He struggles to breathe, feeling something akin to vertigo.
At the same time…
He knows this room.
He knows it so well it shocks him.
Briefly, it even blanks out his mind.
He can only stare around him, fighting the sense that he’s fallen down some kind of rabbit hole in his mind, that he’s lost Cassandra totally.
The room is his.
He recognizes every detail, from the carved wooden symbols on the wall to the cracked wooden altar and burning incense. He knows the dark red curtains over the green-painted bureau that used to be his mother’s. He sees where he burned one corner of the right curtain, by leaving a window open, leaving a flickering candle too close to the cloth.
He knows this place.
He knows it in a different, more intimate way than the room with the flowered couch and the faded yellow carpet.
He knows this time. He knows this history.
It is his.
It feels like his.
In the good and bad ways, it all feels like his. It feels so much like his, his heart hurts, pounding and jerking like it is malfunctioning in his chest.
At the same time, a sense of longing fills him.
A sense of less-acknowledged beauty––beauty coupled with innocence, an aliveness he completely takes for granted at the time.
The Earth is more alive in this time.
It is quieter. More full.
The silences are deeper, the air cleaner.
Presence washes over him.
Birds, insects, sky, stars, animals, the earth itself.
Balidor smells something cooking in the other room––
He has cooked it, he realizes in a kind of wonder.
He cooks here. He feeds them.
He cooks and cleans and––
It is a wooden house.
A house from much longer ago.
Balidor’s mind tilts, still half in shock as he looks around, focusing on the handwoven rug on the floor. He stares at its pantheon of watery creatures, the detailed depictions of the different intermediaries and their gods, their connections to the places beyond the Barrier. His aunt made it, his mother’s sister.
She made it, then died not long after, killed by humans.
He looks at the crack on the hearth from when he dropped a hot stone… and then he sees the adult Cass. She sits on a wooden bench not far from that fire, as if warming her feet.
He feels small here.
He feels impossibly small.
He knows that bench where she sits.
He has sat there many times himself.
He remembers climbing on it when his mother sat there, too, watching as she wrote in her book, using an old quill pen and parchment.
He is still standing there, looking at Cass, trying to decide how he is here––
When something hits him, knocking him to the floor.
He does not see it coming.
He does not see it, or sense the danger––no more now than he did back then.
He loses his balance, his knee crumpling under him and driving into the hard wood. He is already making himself smaller in reflex. The large hand hits him again. Then a boot catches him in the gut, stealing his breath, making him gasp.
He groans, unable to help it.
He is losing himself… losing the adult…
Losing the man…
He finds himself back there.
He finds himself lost there, inside feelings, thoughts, swirls of aleimic light. He feels his own fear, his own wanting, his own grief. It all feels so young. It all feels so alien, yet somehow more familiar than any aspect of himself now.
A version of himself.
He scarcely recognizes it.
Yet somehow, it is still more real to him than who he is now.
He is kicked again. He whimpers as he looks up at the face of a man he hasn’t seen in over four hundred years.
The male seer’s scraggly beard is exactly how Balidor remembers it.
His dark orange eyes stare down at Balidor’s face, the nearly opaque irises decorated with gold and green flecks.
They don’t look real to him…
…yet, like this place, they are more real, more immediate than his own.
He remembers a time he thought his father’s eyes riveting, more beautiful than any irises he had ever seen. They looked to him like the sacred glass jars used to store the oils used in high rituals in the temple down the road.
His father.
His father…
His father has been drinking.
“Little fucking shit,” he slurs in broken Prexci and Mandarin. He lunges for him again, his once-handsome face twisted in glass-eyed fury. “Why haven’t you cleaned this place up? I smell it! I smell my goddamned food burning. Food you said you’d make for
me an hour ago. What the fuck have you been doing, to leave it on the fire?”
He grumbles and growls the words, barely coherent as he staggers deeper into the room.
Panic steals over Balidor’s light.
He cannot stop it entirely.
He should not feel panic. He knows this. He knows exactly what will happen.
He knows this day. He knows what happens next.
He knows what happens the day after that.
He knows it all well enough that he should not care anymore about this.
So many years have passed since this time.
So many seasons have rolled over.
So many friends and lovers have come and gone, passing over to the place beyond the Barrier, people who had done more for him than this man ever did.
Even more than that, Balidor had worked on this.
He had worked to move past these years.
So many meditations and memory exercises have been conducted where Balidor looked at this very thing with other seers. Even when he was very young, he looked at these things in regression sessions with senior seers during his training in the Adhipan. As an adult taking field missions, he looked at these memories again when they were perceived by his elders as interfering with his work.
His father is dead now.
His father has been dead for many years.
Yet somehow it bites deeper here.
It bites deeper, knowing she is watching.
Knowing she is seeing this, seeing him, he feels naked, exposed.
He feels like a fraud, like someone pretending an understanding he doesn’t possess. Someone who pretends he can help someone else, when he can’t even help himself.
He can’t even move past this himself, despite all the intervening years.
He can’t let it go, even after years and years of training and regressions and wiser seers than he trying to help him.
He is a fraud.
Something about her seeing this makes it real in a way it hasn’t felt in decades, in centuries. She watches through the mirror, and he sees her on the other side––her father, her life, her bruises, her pain.
She sees him just as he sees her.
Somehow, it doesn’t make him feel better.
It doesn’t make him feel less alone.
A Glint of Light Page 6
